Commentary on Political Economy

Saturday, 10 March 2012

Habermas And Reification

Marx’s
inability to determine “value” and “prices” independently of the market “mechanism”
induced him to seek the “objectification” of value in the “fetishism of
commodities” which served the same purpose as Weber’s “rationalization” – that
of “measuring” the social synthesis, which is what Lukacs translated into the
concept of “reification”. Just as with Weber’s “rationalization”, the Marxian
concept of “commodity fetishism” or the Lukacsian equivalent of “reification”
simply cannot account for “the social synthesis”. Marx and Lukacs understand
that if this “social synthesis” is objectively
valid – if, in other words, it is possible “to measure” value independently
of political institutions, of violence -, then capitalism would be made
“scientifically legitimate” and the only “objection” to it would rest with its
“efficiency” as a mode of production of social wealth. If, on the contrary,
this “social synthesis” is achieved through a “necessary illusion” (fetishism
of commodities, reification, formalism), then we have a contradiction because
no “illusion”, – let alone a “necessary fiction”, which is an oxymoron! - can
keep a social system in “reproduction”! (We dealt before with Lukacs’s
description of “necessary illusion” – which is an oxymoron because “illusions”
cannot be “necessary” and “necessity” cannot be “illusory”.)

Lukacs perceives
this problem when he asserts, albeit still from the viewpoint of the opposition
of “fragmented alienated labor” against the “(lost!) totality of artisanal labor”, that “the limit to reification is its
‘formalism’” (in HCC, p.101).
Habermas understands Lukacs’s statement to mean that workers are aware that the
“reification” of labor time is “an illusion”, however “necessary” it may be
“objectively” and that therefore the bourgeoisie cannot be “the individual
subject-object of history”. As if “history” required anything like “individual
subject-objects” for exploitation to occur! (Nietzsche would have a fit if he
ever read Lukacs!) Quite obviously, Lukacs’s analysis does not deal with the
problem because, as Habermas rightly notes, this “formalism” can be overcome
only “philosophically” – through “class consciousness”, which entails opposing
one “illusion” with another, because it is hard to see how the “necessary
illusion” of reification could ever become “un-necessary”! (The old FrankfurtSchool realized this, only to preserve
the idolatry of “[Instrumental] Reason”). [See Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1.]

The only way
to lend validity to Lukacs’s position is to reflect that the “formalism” of
reification, of the mythical law of value, will defeat capitalism for the
precise reason that what makes it possible
is a reality of “antagonism”, of capitalist command over living labor that
ensures the “abstraction” of living labor. In other words, there is no “real”
or “necessary” illusion behind reification
but the naked blunt violence of the
capitalist – “the discipline of the factory”. This is why “formalism” is the
limit of capitalism: - because “rationalization” is not an “objective” (Weber)
or merely “ideological” (Marx-Lukacs, then Heidegger-Marcuse) phenomenon, but
rather (with Nietzsche’s invariance, the “unreality” of values) an “arbitrary”
one that responds to a strategy of
command and exploitation.

Lukacs does in
fact, at the page reference cited by Habermas, seem to indicate “formalism” as
the internal limit of the wage relation in terms of the fact that “the market
mechanism” metamorphoses living labor
into a “thing” but only “formally”, only “abstractly” – not “in reality” or
“necessarily” – and must therefore succumb to the “reality” of class
antagonism! It is true that both Marx and Lukacs ultimately fall into this
vicious circle of “market competition” leading to “abstract labor” and then to
“value” as a “necessary illusion” – an operation that is impossible because
“competition” cannot automatically
turn living experience into a “thing”. Habermas, however, completely fails to
see that this is the real political
problem and engages instead in a critique of Lukacs on the ground that the
reality of “reification” (which Lukacs has rendered identical with Weberian
“rationalization” because of his erroneous acceptance of “market competition”)
cannot be “dispelled” by a mythical “class consciousness”! By so doing,
Habermas demonstrates how little he has understood where the actual problem with
the wage relation and with Lukacs’s concept of “reification” (and Marx’s
“fetishism”) really lies: - that is to say, in the impossibility of “reification” or “fetishism” as a “necessary
illusion”! – Certainly not in
Lukacs’s residual Hegelian “idealistic objectivism”!

The oxymoron
of “necessary illusion” to describe the “fetishism of the commodity” and
“reification” is the mirror-image of the Marxian notion of “historical
materialism”: on one side the phenomenon of “value” is an “illusion”, that is,
it is a subjective product of human “history”, whilst on the other side it is
“necessary” because it exemplifies the objective
and material “economic laws of
motion of society”. Because Habermas accepts the “scientific” basis of
“historial materialism” based on the mistaken distinction he draws between “instrumental action” and
“interaction” or “reflection”, he can then accept this oxymoron as indicating
the “historical necessity” of the “commodity form” at a given stage of “the
natural history of society”! Here is the proof in his own words:

Marx did
not adopt an epistemological perspective in developing his conception of the
history of the species as something that has to be comprehended
materialistically. Nevertheless, if social practice does not only accumulate
the successes of instrumental action but also, through class antagonism,
produces and reflects on objective
illusion, then, as part of this process, the analysis of history is
possible only in a phenomenologically mediated (gebrochen) mode of thought. The
science of man itself is critique and must remain so. (K&HI, ch.3, p.62)

To the
degree that the commodity form becomes
the form of objectivity and rules the relations of individuals to one
another as well as their dealings with external nature and with internal
subjective nature, the lifeworld has to become reified and individuals degraded
– as “systems theory” foresees – into an “environment” for a society that has
become external to them, that has consolidated for them into an opaque system,
that has been abstracted from them and become independent of them. Lukacs
shares this perspective with Weber as with Horkheimer; but he is convinced that
this development not only can be stopped practically, but, for reasons that can
be theoretically demonstrated, has to run up against internal limits: “This
rationalization of the world appears to be complete, it seems to penetrate to
the very depths of man’s physical and psychic nature; but it finds its limit in
the formal character of its own rationality”. [HCC, p.101]

The
burden of proof that Marx wanted to discharge in politico-economic terms, with
a theory of crisis, now falls upon a demonstration of the immanent limits to
rationalization, a demonstration that has to be carried out in philosophical
terms,” (Habermas, TCA, Vol1, p.361).

Again,
Habermas is wrong because the context in which Lukacs discusses this “limit” to
rationalization is precisely that of Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis induced both
by antagonism in the labor process and by inter-capitalist competition in the “market”! As a matter
of fact, on p.102, very shortly after the passage cited by Habermas, Lukacs
goes on to cite Marx on this very point!

Division
of labor within the workshop implies the
undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, who are but parts of a
mechanism that belongs to him. The division of labor within society brings into
contact independent commodity producers who acknowledge no other authority than
that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of
their mutual interests,” (Marx, Capital III, quoted in Lukacs, HCC, p.102.)

Of course,
neither Marx nor Lukacs will ever succeed in showing how “the market mechanism”
can “function”, how “competition” between capitalists on can ever provide “the social synthesis” for
the reproduction of capitalist society in any form whatsoever, least of all
that of “value”! For this reason, they rely on the notions of “fetishism” and
“reification”, respectively, to provide the foundation for that comprehensive
“irrationality” constituted by the capitalist wage relation – which is why
Lukacs can then fall prey to and swallow wholesale the “formal rationality” of
a Weber, albeit to denounce its “formal limits”! It is much simpler for us,
instead, to attribute the social synthesis of the society of capital to the
sheer violence of the wage relation, imposed through a network of capitalist
political and social institutions all of which answer ultimately to the
stability of money-wages and the price and monetary system. But this does not
mean that Habermas has identified this
real apory in Marx’s and Lukacs’s theories – the aporetic notion of “labor
value” as the foundation of the social synthesis of capitalist reproduction
through market competition! And this failure, we argue, is a direct result of
Habermas’s persistent wrong focus on the “philosophical”, “idealistic” and
Neo-Kantian theorization of the whole quaestio
of “reason and rationalization” as a discrepancy (Missverhaltnis) between “laws of nature” or epistemology and “laws
of society” or social theory, rather than on the political antagonism of the wage relation!

Habermas is
entirely right to chide Lukacs’s “idealistic” reconciliation of theory and
practice in the “class consciousness” of “the individual subject-object of
history”, namely the proletariat (p.364). But
he completely misses the point that the “contra-diction” in capitalist
social relations is not predominantly one that concerns “communicative action
or competence”! Instead, it is one that is intrinsic to the politics of the wage relation itself! Perhaps
the worst that can be said of Habermas’s “meta-critique” of Marx and Lukacs is
that his own notion of “communicative action” remains trapped in the voluntarism of “consciousness”, of
morality and aestheticism:

It is
characteristic of the pattern of rationalization in capitalist societies that
the complex of cognitive-instrumental rationality establishes itself at the
cost of practical rationality; communicative relations are reified. Thus it makes
sense to ask whether the critique of the incomplete character of the
rationalization that appears as reification does not suggest taking a
complementary relation between cognitive-instrumental rationality, on the one
hand, and moral-practical and aesthetic-practical rationality, on the other, as
a standard that is inherent in the unabridged concept of practice, that is to
say in communicative [p.364] action itself,” (TCA, Vol.1, pp.363-4).